Why are they Unreached?

It is no big secret that we work with unreached peoples.  An unreached people group is generally classified as one in which there is no opportunity for a reproducing Christian community.  In terms of statistics, most people would say that a people group that is less than 2% Christian is unreached. So why, after almost 2,000 years of Christianity, are there still people who have never heard the Good News?  There are a lot of factors: accessibility, language, culture, government restrictions, and many others.  Logistically it is HUGE undertaking to even get a Bible into a language, much less getting the Bible into the hands of the people and having them understand it.  One of the people groups that we work closely with doesn’t even have one book of the Bible translated into their language yet.

Coffee seems like a natural vehicle to be able to work with unreached peoples.  A lot of unreached peoples are farmers, and many unreached peoples (approximately 6,000) live within an area called the “10/40 window”, which a large portion of is close enough to the equator to grow coffee.  These factors helped to make coffee a natural choice as a vehicle to establish relationships and share the gospel with unreached peoples.

The passion and desire of UCI is that we work with these rural farmers, teach them to plant coffee, build relationships with them and share the gospel.

Asians Reaching Asians

Asians reaching Asians, that is one of the major things that we hope to facilitate.  Whenever we look at mission work and trying to reach others, by far the best way to do it is to train up local believers then equip and support them to go out and reach others.  There are so many advantages that they have over Westerners: language, culture, preexisting networks of friends and family, and not to mention their standard of living is much less.  We can sponsor several Asian missionaries for the price of one Western missionary.  One of our hopes here at Underground Coffee International is to mainly employ Asians that can reach Asians.  Our plan is to have our first employees be Asian missionaries.  Even right now we have Asian brothers and sisters waiting on funding so they can go out and reach others. Another organization that is like minded in this has made a great video with this same point in mind.  It is a little long (about eight minutes), but if you have the time it is well worth a look.  The peoples we work with are not in this video, but they are incredibly alike in both culture and need.

Meeting #2

We just wrapped up our second board meeting.  It was a great time of exchanging ideas and we all left encouraged.  For the past several months we have been in the progression of moving from 0 to 1 (there’s an earlier post on that if you’re interested), and now we finally feel like we are in a position to start moving forward.  We are excited for what we have planned over the next few months, and hopefully they will put us in a position to have our first missionary on the field within a year.  Whenever a nonprofit with such a big goal gets started up, there are always question marks and things that come up along the way.  It has just been an amazing ride so far and seeing how God has opened up doors for us to be able to do ministry.  Hopefully you are a part of what we are doing through prayer and partnership.  If you want more details on how to pray or be involved, please send us an email and let us know.  Email us at info@undergroundcoffeeintl.org